The big news here is, like the Samsung Gear VR, the hardware
power comes courtesy of your smartphone. Unlike Sammy’s IFA-announced effort,
however, you’re not tied to just one mobile with the Zeiss VR One; it will play
ball with any iOS or Android handset between 4.7 and 5.2 inches.

Like the Gear VR, the smartphone slots into a front panel.
With the German contender, it is held in by a device-specific tray; the Samsung
Galaxy S5 and the iPhone 6 will be supported at launch with more to come.

Carl Zeiss is putting its faith in the developer community
to build that apps and experiences that it hopes will excite and delight VR One
wearers. It’s calling on “designers, engineers, artists, developers, scientists,
architects, visionaries, experts and you” to make the hardware come alive.

Think of that hardware as Google Cardboard but with durable
polycarbonate instead of cardboard, and a whopping 100 degree field of view.

“Virtual reality has no limits,” reads a Carl Zeiss post on a new Tumblr set up for the platform. “And we all have the unique opportunity
to participate in shaping this new world.”

That shaping will kick off with two basic apps; one a media
player for the likes of pictures and YouTube videos, and the second an AR app
for augmented experiences.

Its makers will be hoping that its open source Unity3D SDK
will provide the rest. It’s available for both iOS and Android.

It’s perhaps not all that surprising that a company that
specialises in lenses has jumped aboard the VR bandwagon. Google proved with
Cardboard that smartphones have the power to provide the VR experiences and
Samsung obviously took that a step further by unleashing the Gear VR last month.

But with reports suggesting that the Korean headset may cost
closer to $200 by the time it hits the shops later this year, and that’s after the $500ish outlay for a Galaxy Note 4, an
unlikely source may have just provided the ‘casual’ VR headset the world was
crying out for.

For while the Carl Zeiss VR One hasn’t got the horsepower to
take on the likes of the Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus – it does
genuinely have a chance at capturing the imagination of a public with serious
VR stirrings.